The present invention relates to the slicing of food products, and more particularly, concerns a slicing machine particularly useful for bakeries, for cutting buns and bagels into multiple thin slices. The slicing machine of the invention is provided with a novel device to ensure that the last part of the bagel to leave the feed hopper is cut.
Bagels are torus-shaped bread products made of a relatively dense, hard dough, frequently topped with poppy or sesame seed. Bagels are in high demand, and special outlets have been established which sell bagels as their primary product.
Bagels may be divided into two by a complete or partial horizontal cut, for toasting or in order to insert therein some other foodstuff such as cheese, vegetables, butter, fish, etc. Such cutting can cause injury when done by hand with an unguided sharp knife, and consequently has resulted in the development of various bagel slicing devices which are much safer and easier to use. Most such devices are hand-powered, but electrically powered bagel slicers are also known.
Many U.S. patents describe bagel cutting devices intended primarily for home use, among them U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,249,445; 5,732,610; 5,881,621; 5,903,982 and 5,927,701. An automatic machine for cutting bagels in half is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,776,252. The devices described in said patents are not slicing machines, however, in the sense that they only cut the bagel into two, or partially cut the bagel to produce a butterfly cut.
Bakeries producing bagels cannot know exactly how many bagels will be required during the course of any given day, and are often faced with a substantial surplus at the end of a working day. Such bagels, even if frozen or refrigerated, cannot be sold as a fresh product on the following morning. A solution to this problem is to slice the left-over bagels into multiple thin slices, typically 4 mm thick. The slices are then baked and packaged and sold as a separate product, referred to as xe2x80x9cbagel chips.xe2x80x9d Clearly, such a slicing operation can only be done economically by an automatic machine built for this purpose.
The machines commonly seen in butcher shops for slicing sausages and in delicatessens for slicing cheese have been used to slice bagels for the preparation of bagel chips. Such a machine has a rotary cutting blade and a reciprocating platform for supporting the food item to be sliced. An operator is needed to hold and advance the food item into the blade. Output is low, and there is the ever-present danger of operator injury.
Bagel chips without a central hole have been produced by preparing rod-shaped pieces of bagel-type dough which are baked and then sliced in a food processor. A vertical feed tube guides the rod-shaped bread product into a rotating disk equipped with a slicer, of the type commonly used for making potato chips. Aside from requiring an operator and failing to provide a solution for utilizing left-over bagels, this method does not provide consumers with the expected, characteristic washer-like bagel shape; the slices produced by this method are disk-like.
A commercially available machine which effects multiple cuts is marketed by ProBake, Inc., 2057 East Aurora Road, Twinsburg, Ohio, U.S.A. This machine has multiple reciprocating blades which inhibit changing the thickness of the slices, and the bagels are fed through the machine by a gravity chute. The claimed input is 60 bagels per minute, the equivalent of about 600 slices, and the machine is quite costly.
A disadvantage of known machinery for bagel slicing is that the last portion of a bagel being cut, which is typically of a smaller diameter than the major portion of the bagel, goes out of control in the feed hopper and enters the collector bin without being cut to the required thickness. The problem arises because the remaining piece of the bagel is thicker than required, yet is thinner than the distance between the bottom of the feed hopper and the surface of the table. The problem cannot be solved by lowering the feed hopper to be closer to the table, because the lower face of the feed hopper must pass over the cutting device.
It is therefore one of the objects of the present invention to obviate the disadvantages of prior art bagel-slicing machines and to fill the gap between manual cutting and high speed, expensive machines, by providing a machine which operates in the range of between 80 to 200 slices per minute.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide means for controlling the last portion of a bagel or bun and to ensure that this portion too is cut to the required thickness.
The present invention achieves the above objects by providing a machine for slicing a bakery product, comprising a supported table surface having an aperture for the passage therethrough of sliced products; a pair of spaced-apart riser blocks projecting above said table surface; at least one power-driven cutting device disposed adjacent to said riser blocks, the cutting device having a horizontal blade extending above said table surface at a distance substantially corresponding to the slice thickness required, and a power-driven turntable, revolvable on a vertical axis and spaced above said cutting device, the turntable rigidly supporting at least one open-ended feed hopper adapted to contain a stack of bakery product items, the lowest item in said stack resting on the table surface and being pushed by the hopper into contact with said cutting device to produce a slice.
In a preferred embodiment of the present invention, there is provided a slicing machine wherein the cutting device comprises a rotary disk blade.
In a most preferred embodiment of the present invention there is provided a slicing machine provided with four feed hoppers and two cutting devices.
Still further embodiments of the invention will be described below.